I’m enrolled into the Extra Small vm beta program. Now I want to use it to test my old packages for performance differences. How to change the vmsize of packages?

There is a post about this here on the Microsoft Azure forum. I tried to hack te package by disabling the encryption like described here. Then I opened the cspkg file with 7Zip and the cssx inside. Both files turn out to be zip archives. The cssx file contains RoleModel.xml which could be the csdef file from your Visual Studio project, because it has the same xmlns.

Adding the vmsize=”ExtraSmall” results in an errormessage while uploading in the portal.

For now I change the vmsize in the csdef and repackage the files with the CSPack util in the Azure SDK. The properties.txt file contains the line “TargetFrameWorkVersion=v4.0”.

cspack [projectfolder]\ServiceDefinition.csdef /role:[webrolename];[webrolename] /out:Repackaged.cspkg /rolePropertiesFile:properties.txt

The package that comes from cspack doesn’t contain the vmsize=”extrasmall” entry in the RoleModel.xml, so my statement that it is the csdef file is wrong. Conclusion for now is: repackage your project to change the vmsize.